Lessons from Our Customers

Earlier I wrote about creating long-term value in product development, and how to uncover the real insights that lead to products that last for years.  Another “lesson-learned” we’ve thought about involved creating a long-term roadmap for the product, one that begins before Launch Day.

Lesson: You must lay out the upgrade path for the product and factor it into its architecture long before you introduce the first version.

At Keithley during the 1990s, our market research had informed us that those working in semiconductor labs were typically unhappy with the fixed-configuration characterization systems then available. All too often, they were being forced to purchase a completely new system every few years to address new test needs because their existing ones lacked flexibility. We created a test system, the Model 4200-SCS, that was originally envisioned to evolve over time so that we could offer customers a product that protected their instrumentation investment over the long term.

We took that upgrade path concept to heart, and today we write five-year “roadmaps” for the Model 4200-SCS. This roadmap is designed to parallel industry technology milestones as laid out in the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors (ITRS) and our customers’ individual corporate roadmaps.  It’s a concept we’ve applied throughout our product line beyond the Model 4200 to our SourceMeter® Source-Measure Units and other primary measurement platforms.  Mapping our products to industry and customer roadmaps has been a vital strategy in creating enduring measurement platforms, not “me-too” instrument solutions.

Engineering Products That Stand the Test of Time

Every product has a lifespan, some measured in months, some in years. Test instruments are not the same as smartphones, of course – we typically seek to build high-value enduring “platforms” that will last several years and stand the test of time for our customers.

Easy to say, hard to do, in any competitive environment. Aside from the commonplace answers of “staying close to customers” and “anticipating the market,” just how DO you build an enduring product? We came up with a few common themes that have driven our more successful product technologies:

Lesson: Listening is hard. Learn how to do it well.
Product development at times seems to be a black art. Perhaps that explains the tremendous number of annual product launches that fail. But at its core, uncovering true opportunity resides on understanding what the customer says, and doesn’t say. The unarticulated need is often the difference between understanding the difference between features that are “nice to have” versus “have to have.” Teaching your marketers and engineers how to ask questions, and pull true insights from customer conversations, lies at the core of creating real value in product development. The psychology of questioning is vitally important to understand. For instance, “what else” will elicit far more than “is there anything else?” Very subtle, but very powerful. Or, one of our marketers loved the question, “what problem does that solve?” He felt that simple query yielded a treasure trove of creative insights.

Of course, we do the typical steps of customer visits, visiting trade shows and conferences. We’re always searching for the new application for our products that can yield to new solutions. One method we’ve used is Google Scholar, which we’ve found to be a powerful scanning tool to uncover ideas we may not hear of otherwise. For instance, during the last decade, we’ve learned researchers far outside the semiconductor lab are using the Model 4200-SCS in some astonishing ways. Just by searching for “Keithley 4200” using Google Scholar, we’re constantly discovering the results of research in technologies that simply didn’t exist when the system was introduced.

I’ll address other lessons-learned in product development practices in later blog posts. For now, remember that your customers are talking to you. Go listen to them.

Engineering Products That Stand the Test of Time

Every product has a lifespan, some measured in months, some in years.  Test instruments are not the same as smartphones, of course – we typically seek to build high-value enduring “platforms” that will last several years and stand the test of time for our customers.

Easy to say, hard to do, in any competitive environment.  Aside from the commonplace answers of “staying close to customers” and “anticipating the market,” just how DO you build an enduring product?  We came up with a few common themes that have driven our more successful product technologies:

Lesson: Listening is hard.  Learn how to do it well. 

Product development at times seems to be a black art.  Perhaps that explains the tremendous number of annual product launches that fail.  But at its core, uncovering true opportunity resides on understanding what the customer says, and doesn’t say.  The unarticulated need is often the difference between understanding the difference between features that are “nice to have” versus “have to have.”  Teaching your marketers and engineers how to ask questions, and pull true insights from customer conversations, lies at the core of creating real value in product development.  The psychology of questioning is vitally important to understand.  For instance, “what else” will elicit far more than “is there anything else?”  Very subtle, but very powerful.  Or, one of our marketers loved the question, “what problem does that solve?”  He felt that simple query yielded a treasure trove of creative insights.

Of course, we do the typical steps of customer visits, visiting trade shows and conferences.  We’re always searching for the new application for our products that can yield to new solutions.  One method we’ve used is Google Scholar, which we’ve found to be a powerful scanning tool to uncover ideas we may not hear of otherwise.  For instance, during the last decade, we’ve learned researchers far outside the semiconductor lab are using the Model 4200-SCS in some astonishing ways. Just by searching for “Keithley 4200” using Google Scholar, we’re constantly discovering the results of research in technologies that simply didn’t exist when the system was introduced.

I’ll address other lessons-learned in product development practices in later blog posts.  For now, remember that your customers are talking to you.  Go listen to them.